So Far, So Great...

The Reviews Have Been Relatively Kind...

New York Times:

A Perky Debut for the Fox Business Network
By ALESSANDRA STANLEY

ON Fox Business Network, the sky isn’t falling — it’s the ground that is going up.

The mood on Rupert Murdoch’s latest television venture was so giggly and upbeat that it belied its own crawl, showing sinking stock prices.

For the inaugural show, the FBN anchor, Alexis Glick, asked Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton a few perfunctory campaign questions via satellite, then went down to Times Square to interview an entrepreneur of the day, the Naked Cowboy, a guitar-strumming singer who says he earns $250,000 a year serenading tourists in a cowboy hat and underpants, and much more in merchandising and record contracts.

“No matter what you think at home,” Ms. Glick, formerly a temporary anchor on the “Today” show on NBC, said, giddily holding up a souvenir hat and briefs. “You can make a small business a reality.”

This is not a network that caters to money managers or day traders. FBN provides economic news for people who don’t follow the economy very closely and hate to hear bad news. Sunny, informal and downright perky, Fox Business Network comes off as a blend of CNBC and a fifth hour of the “Today” show— with the underlying political drumbeat of Fox News. (Global warming is natural and so are tax cuts.)

CNBC didn’t ignore its new competitor yesterday. Throughout the day, ads for CNBC popped up on FBN, including a glowing testimonial from John F. Welch Jr., the former chairman of General Electric, which owns CNBC.

When Mr. Murdoch first announced his plan to create a rival to CNBC, he said he wanted to offer viewers a more “business friendly” network. That was puzzling at the time, because no one has ever accused CNBC stars like Jim Cramer or Maria Bartiromo of being anticapitalist. But not even they could match the ebullient spirits of FBN’s on-air personalities.

Anchors described record oil prices with a lilt, they delighted in the fall of the dollar as a boon to American exports. The network even created its own stock market index, called the Fox 50, which tracks 50 companies with popular products, including Amazon.com, Home Depot and Yum Brands. (The Fox 50 finished the day down 7 points — not down as far as the Dow Jones or Nasdaq.)

Mr. Murdoch has said that the newspaper he is acquiring, The Wall Street Journal, caters to Wall Street while his business network intends to serve Main Street.

CNBC began its midday program, “Power Lunch,” with a standup inside the Four Seasons, a Manhattan restaurant patronized by the likes of Peter G. Peterson, chairman of the Blackstone Group, and Barry Diller. FBN at noon flipped to a live shot inside the Mall of America in Bloomington, Minn.

Neil Cavuto of Fox News has his own show on the new business network, but it was Bill O’Reilly of “The O’Reilly Factor” who laid out FBN’s business model during a cameo appearance. “You want to basically have fun,” Mr. O’Reilly told the anchor Cheryl Casone. “Its so intense, the whole business world. The more fun you can have with it, I think the more people will watch.”

It was hard to muster a lot of fun explaining the $100 billion superfund that the country’s three largest banks have said they will create to shore up the market for mortgage securities.

Eric Bolling, a former financial news commentator who left CNBC for FBN, took quickly to the buoyant spirit of his new home. The superfund could have “a positive impact,” he assured Peter Barnes, a morning anchor. Mr. Bolling uttered the word “bail,” then corrected himself, saying that the superfund could “put a calming tone on the market” and have a “real upside.” When he said that the technical process was “complicated,” Mr. Barnes reminded him warningly, “no jargon.”

FBN makes a point of avoiding technical terms and Wall Street argot. The anchors on CNBC’s morning show “Squawk Box” sit across from each other in their shirt-sleeves to mimic the look of a trading desk, and anchors speak against an electronic backdrop of charts and stock prices.

The hosts of the FBN morning show sat aligned on a curved banquette. A conversation about business blogs on the Internet was set around a wooden tea table, with bookshelves of magazines and newspapers in the background.

Five o’clock is “Happy Hour.” To inaugurate that segment, the anchors Cody Willard and Rebecca Gomez sat in the bar of the Bull and Bear in the Waldorf-Astoria and chatted about business against a backdrop of vodka bottles and blondes. Yesterday, they congratulated Ivanka Trump on her new line of jewelry and sampled ice wines and cheese.

The stock market can close, but on Fox Business Network, the fun never stops.

BusinessWeekPower Lunch October 17, 2007, 4:02PM EST Fox Business Channel: A Great Start
The channel has a few rough spots. But it's fun to watch, which may well draw the nonbusiness and younger viewers Fox seeks
by Ronald Grover

You can understand the confusion. Here I was, channel surfing in search of Rupert Murdoch's newly launched Fox Business Network, and I'm suddenly watching The Donald's 25-year-old daughter, Ivanka Trump, showing off a new line of diamond jewelry. Bracelets instead of bonds? Well, get used to it. The Fox Business Network ain't your grandfather's business channel. And that's the point.

Sure, the News Corp. (NWS) offering has the look, feel, and gravitas of the other business news channel, the incumbent CNBC, controlled by General Electric (GE). Fox has its own "Money Honey" reporting from the New York Stock Exchange floor in Nicole Petallides, who doesn't have the stature of CNBC's Maria Bartiromo but works the floor with the same gusto. Yet Fox Business, which promotes itself with on-air promos that declare "finally, a second opinion," also has a guy named Cody Willard.

Co-anchor Willard, a former hedge fund trader, is Fox Business' long-haired, all-black-wearing alter ego. Along with longtime Fox News correspondent Rebecca Gomez, Willard patrols the Bull & Bear bar at Manhattan's Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, grinning through FBN's after-market-close show, Happy Hour. Mixing interviews with out-of-nowhere investment pearls, Willard chomps cheese during one segment, flaunting his, shall we say, romantic abilities while crowding a table of friends. Willard also ogled Ivanka Trump in a segment in which she talked about real estate, The Apprentice, and those gaudy baubles.

Be Very Afraid
Does Fox Business have a chance? You bet. And if I were top NBC executive Jeff Zucker I'd be hustling full-time to stay ahead. FBN may have just a third of CNBC's households (for now, FBN is available only on a little more than 30 million households served by the country's satellite or cable TV systems), but that's temporary. Especially since Murdoch is famous for spending and spending big to launch his progeny.

Wanna spice up the opening bell? Try a little Price Is Right takeoff. Do viewers really want to see anchors Tom Sullivan and Cheryl Casone guess the stock prices of Google (GOOG) and Wal-Mart (WMT)? I don't know, but I did.

Sure, not everything works. The pre-market show, Money for Breakfast, looks like a coffee klatch at Grandma's house. Five folks stuffed on a single coach, with each trying to sound profound. It was one kibitzer too many for me. But when the show turns to Eric Bolling, who runs down the hot business blogs, the show comes to life with the kind of sparkle that will no doubt bring in the younger viewers Fox specializes in luring.

What FBN Gets Right
Murdoch's grand vision of bringing sometimes thick business news to the masses is never more evident than when FBN sends one of its reporters through the hallways of a half-built condo in Chicago to showcase the difficulties the builder is having finding money to complete the project. Yup, the guy is in the crosshairs of a national economic disaster.

There's no mistaking this for anything but a Fox offering, with the best and not-so-swell inspirations of Roger Ailes, Murdoch's top news lieutenant and perhaps the smartest guy behind a camera. The channel's graphics are loud and busy—with a sliding data line on the bottom of the screen that looks less like a ticker than some leftover NFL scores from Fox Sports. But whoever invented the Fox Fifty—and I'm betting it was Ailes—hit pay dirt, spotlighting 50 top stocks for closer FBN attention.

Ailes seems to have also imported his Fox News touch, which gives business news added lift in what I'm betting will be a successful attempt to bring nonbusiness-news watchers to his channel. It's pure talk radio, and it hews to the right, like much of what News Corp. offers. America's Nightly Scoreboard anchor David Asman skewers liberal Democrats for the mistake of one second-level congressional aide who encouraged House staffers to get inoculated before going to NASCAR events. Is that business news? Who cares. It was totally engrossing TV.

I'm sure Ailes & Co. are working to smooth out what seemed to be some less-than-wonderful technical moments. Scenes of onlookers and clattering of plates at the Bull & Bear were chaotic to the point of distraction. The picture was a little fuzzy and the sound occasionally muffled. But FBN already has some big-league advertisers—TD Ameritrade (AMTD) and LendingTree among them—and I'm betting others will come calling soon enough for a cable channel that is going to expand the entire business-news category through its clever segments and substantial market coverage. Murdoch clearly wants to bring business to Main Street, NASCAR, and younger folks who like to mix stock chatter with their after-hour cocktails. After one day on the air, I'm betting he's already headed into a bull market.

Grover is Los Angeles bureau chief for BusinessWeek.

New York Mag:

Fox Business Network: It's Gold!
No, literally — it's all about gold. Rupert Murdoch's new cable channel ran multiple segments on gold in its first week, which we thought was a little weird. But after we watched the hundredth paid advertisement for gold (damn watching TV in real time!), we thought, maybe it makes sense. If your sponsors are talking about it, why shouldn't you? Anyway, you may be wondering how on earth we happened to notice something like that. It's because we have been watching FBN every day, ALL WEEK. Yes! We love Alexis Glick, Neil Cavuto, and their motley crew of optimism pirates. They're irresistible (especially young NYSE floor reporter Nicole Petallides, who makes rival Maria Bartiromo look like the Jessica Tandy in Driving Miss Daisy) and their financial joy is maddeningly, confusingly infectious. After the jump, our other favorite FBN moments from a week of watching.
• They have this amazing regular feature where they ask viewers "What would you do with a grand?" Then, once people e-mail in their ideas, they make fun of them. Genius!
• They love puns. Hottie midday host Connell McShane introduced a segment on McDonald's thusly: "All the critics out there say their products are filled with fat and calories, but Wall Street's thrilled with it's fat profits!" Not to be outshone, reporter Jenna Lee told McShane that she loves McDonald's for its flavor, too. "It is fat with a P-H," she shot back. "For sure!"
• They make it personal. "I'm a wino," admitted host Tom Sullivan during a special on investing in wine. "I've always been a wino. I love good wine. Not the cheap stuff, the good stuff." Indeed.
• They're hip and up to date. "Didn't Radiohead just give away their album for free or something?" Cherly Casone asked on Wednesday. No really, we're not making fun. For someone on a Fox network to even remotely be aware of that is literally astounding.
• They have good taste in music. Today, during changeovers from segments on the twentieth anniversary of the great Black Monday stock-market crash of 1987, they played Starship's "Nothing's Gonna Stop Us Now." That's right. Let them say we're crazy – what do they know?
• They truly have the best guests. We're not talking about business legends like Warren Buffet. We're talking about Charlie Daniels, Jermaine Dupri, Ivanka Trump, the Harlem Globetrotters, and the woman who invented "Take Your Daughter to Work Day." Take that, Larry King!

Just so you know, this isn't going to be like our obsessive recapping of Gossip Girl. After watching FBN for a week, we noticed upsetting changes in our habits. We started caring whether a stock was in the "Fox 50," we started getting emotionally involved in the NASDAQ as a "comeback kid," and we began speaking in an outside voice to people who were sitting two feet away from us. So never again. But it was fun while it lasted.